The Modern Regime, Volume 1

by Hippolyte Taine

Thus fashioned and brought into the world, he felt that, from first to the last, he was of his people and country.

"Everything was better there," said he, at Saint Helena,[1113] "even the very smell of the soil, which he could have detected with his eyes shut; nowhere had he found the same thing. He imagined himself there again in early infancy, and lived over again the days of his youth, amidst precipices, traversing lofty peaks, deep valleys, and narrow defiles, enjoying the honors and pleasures of hospitality, "treated everywhere as a brother and compatriot," without any accident or insult ever suggesting to him that his confidence was not well grounded." At Bocognano,[1114] where his mother, pregnant with him, had taken refuge, "where hatred and vengeance extended to the seventh degree of relationship, and where the dowry of a young girl was estimated by the number of her Cousins, I was feasted and made welcome, and everybody would have died for me." Forced to become a Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated at the expense of the king in a French school, he became rigid in his insular patriotism, and loudly extolled Paoli, the liberator, against whom his relations had declared themselves. "Paoli," said he, at the dinner table,[1115]" was a great man. He loved his country. My father was his adjutant, and never will I forgive him for having aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have followed her fortunes and have succumbed only with her." Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man, always moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, and opens himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions of hatred: "I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I can!"—"Corsican by nation and character," wrote his professor of history in the Military Academy, "he will go far if circumstances favor him."[1116]—Leaving the Academy, and in garrison at Valence and Auxonne, he remains always hostile, denationalized; his old bitterness returns, and, addressing his letters to Paoli, he says: "I was born when our country perished. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited on our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in floods of blood—such was the odious spectacle on which my eyes first opened! The groans of the dying, the shrieks of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from my birth... I will blacken those who betrayed the common cause with the brush of infamy.... vile, sordid souls corrupted by gain!"[1117] A little later, his letter to Buttafuoco, deputy in the Constituent Assembly and principal agent in the annexation to France, is one long strain of renewed, concentrated hatred, which, after at first trying to restrain it within the bounds of cold sarcasm, ends in boiling over, like red-hot lava, in a torrent of scorching invective.—From the age of fifteen, at the Academy and afterwards in his regiment, he finds refuge in imagination in the past of his island;[1118] he recounts its history, his mind dwells upon it for many years, and he dedicates his work to Paoli. Unable to get it published, he abridges it, and dedicates the abridgment to Abbé Raynal, recapitulating in a strained style, with warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small community, its revolts and deliverances, its heroic and sanguinary outbreaks, its public and domestic tragedies, ambuscades, betrayals, revenges, loves, and murders,—in short, a history similar to that of the Scottish highlanders, while the style, still more than the sympathies, denotes the foreigner. Undoubtedly, in this work, as in other youthful writings, he follows as well as he can the authors in vogue—Rousseau, and especially Raynal; he gives a schoolboy imitation of their tirades, their sentimental declamation, and their humanitarian grandiloquence. But these borrowed clothes, which incommode him, do not fit him; they are too tight, and the cloth is too fine; they require too much circumspection in walking; he does not know how to put them on, and they rip at every seam. Not only has he never learned how to spell, but he does not know the true meaning, connections, and relations of words, the propriety or impropriety of phrases, the exact significance of imagery;[1119] he strides on impetuously athwart a pell-mell of incongruities, incoherencies, Italianisms, and barbarisms, undoubtedly stumbling along through awkwardness and inexperience, but also through excess of ardor and of heat;[1120] his jerking, eruptive thought, overcharged with passion, indicates the depth and temperature of its source. Already, at the Academy, the professor of belles-lettres[1121] notes down that "in the strange and incorrect grandeur of his amplifications he seems to see granite fused in a volcano." However original in mind and in sensibility, ill-adapted as he is to the society around him, different from his comrades, it is clear beforehand that the current ideas which take such hold on them will obtain no hold on him.

Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each other, it might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to the other, although accepting neither.—Pensioner of the king, who supported him at Brienne, and afterwards in the Military Academy; who also supported his sister at Saint-Cyr; who, for twenty years, is the benefactor of his family; to whom, at this very time, he addresses entreating or grateful letters over his mother's signature—he does not regard him as his born general; it does not enter his mind to take sides and draw his sword in his patron's behalf;' in vain is he a gentleman, to whom, d'Hozier has certified; reared in a school of noble cadets, he has no noble or monarchical traditions.[1122]—Poor and tormented by ambition, a reader of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal, and tacking together sentences of philosophic fustian about equality, if he speaks the jargon of the day, it is without any belief in it. The phrases in vogue form a decent, academical drapery for his ideas, or serve him as a red cap for the club; he is not bewildered by democratic illusions, and entertains no other feeling than disgust for the revolution and the sovereignty of the populace.—At Paris, in April,1792, when the struggle between the monarchists and the revolutionaries is at its height, he tries to find "some successful speculation,"[1123] and thinks he will hire and sublet houses at a profit. On the 20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter of curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at a window place the red cap on his head, exclaims, so as to be heard," Che Caglione!" Immediately after this: "How could they let that rabble enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes to a friend's house on the Carrousel and there, still as a looker-on, views at his ease all the occurrences of the day.[1124] Finally, the chateau is forced and he strolls through the Tuileries, looks in at the neighboring cafés, and that is all: he is not disposed to take sides, he has no Jacobin or royalist inclination. His features, even, are so calm "as to provoke many hostile and distrustful stares, as someone who is unknown and suspicious."—Similarly, after the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, his "Souper de Beaucaire" shows that if he condemns the departmental insurrection it is mainly because he deems it futile: on the side of the insurgents, a defeated army, no position tenable, no cavalry, raw artillerymen, Marseilles reduced to its own troops, full of hostile sans-culottes and so besieged, taken and pillaged. Chances are against it: "Let the impoverished regions, the inhabitants of Vivaris, of the Cevennes, of Corsica, fight to the last extremity, but if you lose a battle and the fruit of a thousand years of fatigue, hardship, economy, and happiness become the soldier's prey."[1125] Here was something with which the Girondists could be converted!—None of the political or social convictions which then exercised such control over men's minds have any hold on him. Before the 9th of Thermidor he seemed to be a "republican montagnard," and we follow him for months in Provence, "the favorite and confidential adviser of young Robespierre," "admirer" of the elder Robespierre,[1126] intimate at Nice with Charlotte Robespierre. After the 9th of Thermidor has passed, he frees himself with bombast from this compromising friendship: "I thought him sincere," says he of the younger Robespierre, in a letter intended to be shown, "but were he my father and had aimed at tyranny, I would have stabbed him myself." On returning to Paris, after having knocked at several doors, he takes Barras for a patron. Barras, the most brazen of the corrupt, Barras, who has overthrown and contrived the death of his two former protectors.[1127] Among the contending parties and fanaticisms which succeed each other he keeps cool and free to dispose of himself as he pleases, indifferent to every cause and concerning himself only with his own interests.—On the evening of the 12th of Vendémiaire, on leaving the Feydeau theatre, and noticing the preparations of the sectionists,[1128] he said to Junot:

"Ah, if the sections put me in command, I would guarantee to place them in the Tuileries in two hours and have all those Convention rascals driven out!"

Five hours later, summoned by Barras and the Conventionalists, he takes "three minutes" to make up his mind, and, instead of "blowing up the representatives," he mows down the Parisians. Like a good condottière, he does not commit himself, considers the first that offers and then the one who offers the most, only to back out afterwards, and finally, seizing the opportunity, to grab everything.—He will more and more become a true condottière, that is to say, leader of a band, increasingly independent, pretending to submit under the pretext of the public good, looking out only for his own interest, self-centered, general on his own account and for his own advantage in his Italian campaign before and after the 18th of Fructidor.[1129] He is, however, a condottière of the first class, already aspiring to the loftiest summits, "with no stopping-place but the throne or the scaffold,"[1130] "determined[1131] to master France, and through France Europe. Without distraction, sleeping only three hours during the night," he plays with ideas, men, religions, and governments, exploiting people with incomparable dexterity and brutality. He is, in the choice of means as of ends, a superior artist, inexhaustible in glamour, seductions, corruption, and intimidation, fascinating, and yet more terrible than any wild beast suddenly released among a herd of browsing cattle. The expression is not too strong and was uttered by an eye-witness, almost at this very date, a friend and a competent diplomat: "You know that, while I am very fond of the dear general, I call him to myself the little tiger, so as to properly characterize his figure, tenacity, and courage, the rapidity of his movements, and all that he has in him which maybe fairly regarded in that sense."[1132]

At this very date, previous to official adulation and the adoption of a recognized type, we see him face to face in two portraits drawn from life, one physical, by a truthful painter, Guérin, and the other moral, by a superior woman, Madame de Staël, who to the best European culture added tact and worldly perspicacity. Both portraits agree so perfectly that each seems to interpret and complete the other. "I saw him for the first time,"[1133] says Madame de Staël, "on his return to France after the treaty of Campo-Formio. After recovering from the first excitement of admiration there succeeded to this a decided sentiment of fear." And yet, "at this time he had no power, for it was even then supposed that the Directory looked upon him with a good deal of suspicion." People regarded him sympathetically, and were even prepossessed in his favor;

"thus the fear he inspired was simply due to the singular effect of his person on almost all who approached him. I had met men worthy of respect and had likewise met men of ferocious character; but nothing in the impression which Bonaparte produced on me reminded me of either. I soon found, in the various opportunities I had of meeting him during his stay in Paris, that his character was not to be described in terms commonly employed; he was neither mild nor violent, nor gentle nor cruel, like certain personages one happens to know. A being like him, wholly unlike anybody else, could neither feel nor excite sympathy; he was both more and less than a man; his figure, intellect, and language bore the imprint of a foreign nationality.. .. far from being reassured on seeing Bonaparte oftener, he intimidated me more and more every day. I had a confused impression that he was not to be influenced by any emotion of sympathy or affection. He regards a human being as a fact, an object, and not as a fellow-creature. He neither hates nor loves, he exists for himself alone; the rest of humanity are so many ciphers. The force of his will consists in the imperturbable calculation of his egoism. He is a skillful player who has the human species for an antagonist, and whom he proposes to checkmate... Every time that I heard him talk I was struck with his superiority; it bore no resemblance to that of men informed and cultivated through study and social intercourse, such as we find in France and England. His conversation indicated the tact of circumstances, like that of the hunter in pursuit of his prey. His spirit seemed a cold, keen sword-blade, which freezes while it wounds. I felt a profound irony in his mind, which nothing great or beautiful could escape, not even his own fame, for he despised the nation whose suffrages he sought... "—"With him, everything was means or aims; spontaneity, whether for good or for evil, was entirely absent."

No law, no ideal and abstract rule, existed for him;

"he examined things only with reference to their immediate usefulness; a general principle was repugnant to him, either as so much nonsense or as an enemy."

Now, if we contemplate Guérin's portrait,[1134] we see a spare body, whose narrow shoulders under the uniform wrinkled by sudden movements, the neck swathed in its high twisted cravat, the temples covered by long, smooth, straight hair, exposing only the mask, the hard features intensified through strong contrasts of light and shade, the cheeks hollow up to the inner angle of the eye, the projecting cheek-bones, the massive, protuberant jaw, the sinuous, mobile lips, pressed together as if attentive, the large, clear eyes, deeply sunk under the broad, arched eyebrows, the fixed, oblique look, as penetrating as a rapier, and the two creases which extend from the base of the nose to the brow, as if in a frown of suppressed anger and determined will. Add to this the accounts of his contemporaries[1135] who saw or heard the curt accent or the sharp, abrupt gesture, the interrogating, imperious, absolute tone of voice, and we comprehend how, the moment they accosted him, they felt the dominating hand which seizes them, presses them down, holds them firmly and never relaxes its grasp.